To the hills!
The mountain spine of New Zealand's South Island was given the imaginative name 'The Southern Alps' by James "call me Captain Obvious" Cook on March 23rd 1770. I believe it was known locally at the time as te tiritiri o te moana and is thought in the Maori ontology to embody some frozen sailors from an ancient godly canoe. The lead sailor (and tallest mountain) is Aoraki and he is there, turned to stone by the freezing winds, with his brothers.
Our Captain Obvious called Aoraki, the tallest mountain in New Zealand, 'Mount Cook' (see below).
It took about an hour to drive from our motel in Kurow to the foot of Lake Pukaki to get this shot of Aoraki and I. Aoraki was certainly hanging out in the clouds that day, with his head the only spot of moisture in the otherwise clear blue skies.
We had left Dunedin for a weekend of culture!
This part of the Waitaki is rich in Maori rock art dating from pre-contact times aswell as from the 19th century. Local people left a variety of images drawn on favoured limestone outcrops, using a mixture of animal fats and plant resins, plus ochre, to describe abstract patterns and features. Some animals and humans can be discerned, and later drawings feature European sailing ships and men on horseback. The image shown is a lizard (according to Ellen) and a man (according to me), you need to see the whole site to form an opinion, but it's certainly open to interesting interpretations!
Ellen is working on interpretive information boards and site design for these areas, in her role as Maori Heritage Advisor for the Historic Places Trust.
It took us three hours to drive each way and so we made sure to stop and enjoy the view along the way. Moeraki is about an hour's drive North of Dunedin and features some quite remarkable geological curiosities called, again quite imaginatively, The Moeraki Boulders:
Tradition holds that the boulders are the treasure of a foundered canoe, arai te uru, which brought kumara (the sweet potato) from Hawaiiki, the ancestral lands of Maori. The kumara was washed ashore and became stone here at Moeraki. They are a fitting testament to an amazing feat of technology and daring which was achieved by prehistoric men and women: namely the transport of the South American sweet potato plant to New Zealand, via the enormous Pacific Ocean.
